In 2023, the G15 group of London’s biggest housing associations convened an emergency summit to address the rapidly worsening temporary accommodation crisis across the city. It was dubbed ‘Project 123’ in response to the grim statistic that, at the time, one in every 23 children in London was homeless.
A year later, the name had already become an anachronism: in just 12 months, the ratio had increased to one in 21 kids.
At the time of writing, London’s councils are spending a combined £5.5 million each and every day on housing families in temporary housing – much of it in B&Bs, emergency overnight accommodation and hotel rooms – up from £4 million a day a year ago. Large numbers of families have been forced to move to homes not in their own neighbourhoods, but scattered across the country; miles from the family and social networks on which they rely.
The cost of housing families in need is becoming an existential burden on already-stretched councils. But, behind the numbers, are a hundred thousand individual tragedies: toddlers living in damp and mouldy flats; youngsters forced to share rooms with parents and siblings; teenagers entering higher education having spent their entire school careers living in hotel rooms. The lives diminished and the opportunities squandered by our inability to build safe, affordable homes is a scandal and we should be ashamed that we have allowed it to happen.
In the first quarter of 2025, London built just 347 affordable homes. Even our private-sector housebuilding was pitiful: only 2,158 homes were built in the first half of this year, just 5 per cent of the government’s target for the city. The reasons for this shortfall are myriad. Following years of extraordinary construction inflation, in much of the country it’s impossible to build homes for anything less than they’re worth. The glacial pace of the Building Safety Regulator has replaced the planning system as the principal drag on large housing regeneration schemes.
Local authorities have a statutory duty to provide accommodation to families who present themselves as homeless. Councils are already under massive financial strain, but the extraordinary costs of temporary accommodation are mind-blowing. The annual cost is now nearly £3 billion – more than we’re spending on building new affordable homes. Much of this cash is pouring into the pockets of private landlords and hotel chains, despite much of the accommodation being substandard and often dangerous. We clearly need solutions to this crisis, quickly and efficiently. But, as we can’t build permanent homes, what else can we do?
During the early days of the Covid pandemic, the government introduced emergency planning powers that allowed health authorities to build hospitals and morgues without following the conventional and convoluted planning process. The nation deemed the situation sufficiently dire that the need to quickly deploy emergency infrastructure justified avoiding the bureaucracy that such buildings would be subject to in normal times.
As it turned out, these Nightingale Hospitals were not required, but they provide a useful example of how the state can step up to combat major health emergencies when necessary. The current homelessness crisis is no less of an emergency and requires a similarly vigorous response.
What London does not lack is space. There are car parks, stalled development sites, vacant plots and redundant scraps of land in abundance across the city. Each and every one could be used to help alleviate the tragedy of the homelessness crisis. With a bit of determination and creativity we could rapidly deploy new homes, at speed and at scale, on these sites within a few months. Consider for a moment the profound impact on the lives of thousands of Londoners that would make.
Many housing solutions already exist. In south-east London, modular specialist ZED PODS has installed 25 zero-carbon homes above a Bromley car park, retaining four out of five spaces below.
And in Cardiff, which has been for some time a pioneer of modular housing solutions, Wates and RSHP have deployed award-winning permanent houses using @Home’s timber-based, carbon-positive offsite construction system (the use of which is perversely prohibited in London, due to grant funding restrictions).
Over the past year, RCKa has been working on a prototype home that we believe could help deliver these objectives. Working with main contractor Wates and offsite specialist Rollalong, we have developed a high-quality home which can be installed anywhere in London in under two hours.
Compliant with space standards, providing a generous two- or three-bedroom apartment, this modular dwelling is entirely made in Rollalong’s Dorset factory and brought to site in three or four separate parts, which can be assembled for considerably less expense than a traditionally built home.
Despite the speed and cost benefits, this is in no way inferior to a permanent home. With a design life of more than 60 years, in some respects these dwellings are better than much of the new housing stock that has been built across the country in recent years. How many new-build homes do you know of that feature a 2.9m ceiling, as does ours? A deep knowledge of what goes into each module allows the materials to be recovered at end of life and the steel frame can be repurposed for other uses, such as classrooms, site accommodation, or even another home.
Some compromises are necessary to achieve these homes at that pace, however. The homes lack private external amenity space, so we will need exemplary placemaking and high-quality external space and play areas to compensate. Their location is vital, too. They will need to be close to public transport and local amenities, such as shops and schools. Community space should be included and the arrangement of the homes on the site will be vital to embed a sense of belonging, security and community.
The country has the technical capability to deliver these homes at scale, but the regulatory and policy environment needs to adapt. Permitted development regulations must be expanded, as they were during the pandemic, to allow us to deploy meanwhile homes without the inherent complexities of full planning permission. Inherent in this are dimensional parameters which should protect neighbouring properties, and appropriate locations will need to be identified close to social infrastructure and public transport. Councils need to adopt progressive procurement too, encouraging direct awards and comparing cost submissions not between different bidders, but rather with the amounts currently being squandered on hotels and private landlords.
The pandemic was brought to an end when the pharmaceutical industry mobilised to deliver a vaccine in a fraction of the normal time, and this subsequently led to a flurry of innovative life-changing therapies in other areas of medicine. In a similar way, a co-ordinated national strategy to industrialise housing could address the urgent need for emergency accommodation while building a robust manufacturing sector which is prepped to deliver the permanent homes the government has committed to in the coming years.
Over 130,000 households spent last night in temporary accommodation, up by 14,000 since last year. We have all the tools we need to put this right. There’s no excuse for us not to use them.
This article was published in the Architects’ Journal in December 2026.